pablobarbera.github.com/research.html at master · gary-mu/pablobarbera.github.com · GitHub

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    <title>Pablo Barberá, New York University</title>
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         <h2>Research</h2>

<p style="text-align: justify;">My research interests encompass the areas of political behavior and electoral institutions, the use of new information and communication technologies in politics, and the electoral consequences of corruption scandals. Below is a summary of the research projects I am or have been involved in.</p>

<h2 style="text-align: justify;">Work in progress</h2>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>Birds of the Same Feather Tweet Together. Bayesian Ideal Point Estimation Using Twitter Data.</strong> [<a href="http://files.nyu.edu/pba220/public/barbera_twitter_ideal_points.pdf">Working paper</a>, December 2013]<font size="2"><blockquote>Political actors and citizens increasingly engage in political conversations on social media outlets such as Twitter. In this paper I show that the structure of the social networks in which they are embedded has the potential to become a source of information about policy positions. Under the assumption that social networks are homophilic, I develop a Bayesian Spatial Following model that scales Twitter users along a common ideological dimension based on who they follow. I apply this network-based method to estimate ideal points for a large sample of Twitter users in the US, the UK, Spain, Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands. The resulting positions of the party accounts on Twitter are highly correlated with offline measures based on their voting records and their manifestos. Similarly, this method is able to successfully classify individuals who state their political orientation publicly, and a sample of users from the state of Ohio whose Twitter accounts are matched with their voter registration history. To illustrate the potential contribution of these estimates, I examine the extent to which online behavior is polarized along ideological lines. Using the 2012 US presidential election campaign as a case study, I find that public exchanges on Twitter take place predominantly among users with similar viewpoints.</blockquote></font></p>

<p style="text-align: justify;">(with Richard Bonneau, John T. Jost, Jonathan Nagler, and Joshua Tucker) <strong>Is There Anybody Out There? The Effects of Legislators’ Communication with their Constituents.</strong> [<a href="http://files.nyu.edu/pba220/public/barbera_twitter_responsiveness.pdf">Working paper</a>, March 2014]<font size="2"><blockquote>Are legislators responsive to their constituents in their public communication? To what extent are they able to shape the agenda that the mass public cares about, as expressed by the issues they discuss? We address this twofold question with an analysis of all tweets sent by Members of the U.S. Congress and a random sample of their followers from January 2013 to March 2014. Using a Latent Dirichlet Allocation model, we extract topics that represent the diversity of issues that legislators and ordinary citizens discuss on this social networking site. Then, we exploit variation in the distribution of topics over time to test whether Members of Congress lead or follow their constituents in their selection of issues to discuss, employing a Granger-causality framework. We find that legislators are responsive in their public statements to their constituents, but also that they have limited influence on their followers’ public agenda. To further understand the mechanisms that explain political responsiveness, we also examine whether Members of Congress are more responsive to specific constituents groups, showing that they are more influenced by co-partisans, politically interested citizens, and social media users located within their constituency.</blockquote></font></p>

<p style="text-align: justify;">(with Pablo Fernández-Vázquez and Gonzalo Rivero) <strong>Rooting out corruption or rooting for corruption? The Heterogenous Electoral Consequences of Scandals</strong> [<a href="http://files.nyu.edu/pba220/public/rooting_out_corruption.pdf">Working paper</a>, January 2013]
<font size="2"><blockquote> In this article we analyze the electoral consequences of corruption scandals in the 2007 and 2011 Spanish local elections. Previous studies on this case Jiménez (2007); Rivero and Fernández-Vázquez (2010); Costas et al. (2010) have found that voters are not impervious to scandals, but corrupt mayors barely suﬀer electoral consequences for their actions. That conclusion is consistent with the consensus in the comparative literature that corruption has a signiﬁcant but mild electoral eﬀect (Golden, 2006). However, these studies have assumed that voters punish equally all kinds of corrupt practices. We challenge this assumption by distinguishing between two types of corruption, according to the type of welfare consequences they have for the municipality. We ﬁnd that voters ignore or even reward corruption when there are side beneﬁts to it, and that punishment is only administered in those cases in which they do not receive compensation. Our results also show that the electoral punishment is smaller in magnitude when the corrupt incumbent retires, and when the media coverage of the scandal is not extensive.</blockquote></font></p>

<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>When Duverger Becomes Autocratic: Electoral Systems in Non-Democratic Regimes, 1950-2008.</strong> [<a href="http://files.nyu.edu/pba220/public/barbera_ipsa_2012.pdf">Draft</a>, July 2012]<blockquote><font size="2">Do electoral rules matter [also] in non-democratic regimes? The literature on electoral system choice in democracies, and its political consequences, is vast. However, these issues have been neglected in previous studies on elections under dictatorship. In this paper, I address this lack of systematic research. I show that electoral rules have a substantive and enduring impact on political competition in dictatorships with multiparty elections, for they affect the cohesiveness of the opposition. In democracies, the so-called Duverger's law states that restrictive electoral rules shrink the size of the party system (Duverger, 1954; Cox, 1997). Such electoral systems constrain the number of electoral parties that are awarded with seats, and thus, create incentives for parties and voters to coordinate their entry and voting decisions, respectively. I argue that similar effects relate electoral rules and opposition fragmentation in authoritarian elections. These hypothesis are tested using a new dataset that encompasses the electoral rules used in all legislative multi-party elections held under both democratic and authoritarian regimes between 1950 and 2008. In order to address the potential endogeneity issues, I apply different identification strategies, finding robust evidence that electoral rules affect opposition cohesiveness.</blockquote></font></p>

<p style="text-align: justify;">(with Gonzalo Rivero) <strong>Understanding the political representativeness of Twitter users.</strong> [<a href="http://files.nyu.edu/pba220/public/barbera_rivero_2013.pdf">Working paper</a>, December 2013] [website: <a href="http://www.tuitometro.es">tuitometro.es</a>]<font size="2"><blockquote>In this article we analyze the structure and content of the political conversations that took place through the micro-blogging platform Twitter in the context of the 2011 Spanish legislative elections and the 2012 US presidential elections. Using a unique database of nearly 70 million tweets collected during both election campaigns, we find that Twitter replicates most of the existing inequalities in public political exchanges. Twitter users who write about politics tend to be male, to live in urban areas, and to have extreme ideological preferences. Our results have important implications for future research on the relationship between social media and politics, since they highlight the need to correct for potential biases derived from these sources of inequality.</blockquote></font></p>

<h2 style="text-align: justify;">Published articles and chapters</h2>
<p style="text-align: justify;">(with Cristian Vaccari, Augusto Valeriani, Richard Bonneau, John T. Jost, Jonathan Nagler, and Joshua Tucker) <strong>Social Media and Political Communication: A survey of Twitter users during the 2013 Italian general election</strong>. 2013. Italian Political Science Review, 3/2013: 381-410. [<a href="http://www.rivisteweb.it/doi/10.1426/75245">Link</a>]</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">(with Pedro Riera, Raúl Gómez, Juan Antonio Mayoral, and José Ramón Montero) <strong>The electoral consequences of corruption scandals in Spain</strong>. 2013. Crime, Law and Social Change, 60(6): 515:534. [<a href="http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10611-013-9479-1#page-1">Link</a>]</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">(with Pablo Fernández-Vázquez) <strong>Los electores ante la corrupción</strong>, in Fundación Alternativas, <em>Informe sobre la democracia en España 2012. </em>(in Spanish) [<a href="http://www.falternativas.org/laboratorio/libros-e-informes/ide/informe-sobre-la-democracia-en-espana-2012">Link</a>]</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>Voting for Parties or for Candidates? The Trade-Off Between Party and Personal Representation in Spanish Regional and Local Elections</strong>. 2010. Revista Española de Investigaciones Sociológicas, 132: 35-63. [<a href="http://www.reis.cis.es/REIS/PDF/REIS_132_021285919804928.pdf">Link</a>]</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">(with Javier Arregui) <strong>Naturaleza e influencia de los <em>think tanks</em> en el proceso político en España</strong>. 2011. Working Papers 292, Institut de Ciències Polítiques i Socials. (in Spanish) [<a href="http://www.icps.es/archivos/WorkingPapers/wp292.pdf">Link</a>]</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">(with Clara Riba) <strong>Anàlisi de la realitat socioestructural de les Comunitats Autònomes</strong>, in Gallego, R. and Subirats, J. (eds.) <em>Autonomies i desigualtats a Espanya: Percepcions, evolució social i polítiques de benestar. </em>Institut d'Estudis Autonòmics. (in Catalan) [<a href="http://www.gencat.cat/drep/iea/pdfs/ctA_13.pdf">Link</a>]</p>

<h2 style="text-align: justify;">Conference papers</h2>

<p style="text-align: justify;">(with Raúl Gómez, Juan A. Mayoral, José Ramón Montero y Pedro Riera) <strong> The Electoral Consequences of Political Scandals in Spain: A Micro-Level Approach.</strong> [Draft, June 2012]</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">(with Pedro Riera and Elias Dinas) <strong>Parliamentary Representation and Electoral Success: Beginning a Journey of Thousand Votes with a Single Step</strong>. [<a href="http://www.march.es/Recursos_Web/Ceacs/Paginas_personales/Publicaciones/priera601.pdf">link</a>]</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">(with Pedro Riera) <strong>Voting for Locals? Personal Vote in Spanish General Elections</strong>. [<a href="http://www.ecprnet.eu/conferences/general_conference/Reykjavik/paper_details.asp?paperid=2086">link</a>]</p>

<h2 style="text-align: justify;">Miscellaneous</h2>
<p style="text-align: justify;">(with José Ramón Montero, Pedro Riera, Raúl Gómez and Juan A. Mayoral) <strong>Comportamiento electoral de los españoles en comicios municipales: una aproximación multinivel</strong>. Collaborative Project, awarded with a Research Grant by the Spanish Center for Sociological Research (CIS).</p>

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